Footprints of the Red Men: Indian geographical names in the valley of Hudson's river, the valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: their location and the probable meaning of some of them.Ruttenber, Edward Manning
History
Footprints of the Red Men: Indian geographical names in the valley of Hudson's river, the valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: their location and the probable meaning of some of them.
Ruttenber, Edward Manning
Indians of North America -- New York (State); Names, Geographical -- New York (State); Names, Indian -- North America
Shawangunk, the name of a town, a stream of water, and a range of hills
in Ulster County, was that of a specific place from which it was
extended. It is of record in many orthographies, the first in 1684, of
a place called _Chauwanghungh,_ [FN-1] in deed from the Indians to
Governor Dongan, in the same year, _Chawangon,_ [FN-2] and _Chanwangung_
in 1686, [FN-3] later forms running to variants of _Shawangunk._ The
locative is made specific in a grant to Thomas Lloyd in 1687; [FN-4] in
a grant to Severeign Tenhout in 1702, [FN-5] and in a description in
1709, "Adjoining Shawangung, Nescotack and the Palze." [FN-6] In several
other patent descriptions the locative is further identified by "near to"
or "adjoining," and finally (1723) by "near the village of Showangunck,"
at which time the "village" consisted of the dwellings of Thomas Lloyd,
on the north side of Shawangunk Kill; Severeign Tenhout on the south
side; and Jacobus Bruyn, Benjamin Smedes, and others, with a mill, at and
around what was known later as the village of Tuthiltown. In 1744,
Jacobus Bruyn was the owner of the Lloyd tract. [FN-7] The distribution
of the name over the district as a general locative is distinctly
traceable from this center. It was never the name of the mountain, nor
of the stream, and it should be distinctly understood that it does not
appear in Kregier's Journal of the Second Esopus War, nor in any record
prior to 1684, and could not have been that of any place other than that
distinctly named in Governor Dongan's deed and in Lloyd's Patent.
Topographically, the tract was at and on the side of a hill running north
from the fiats on the stream to a point of which Nescotack was the
summit, the Lloyd grant lying in part on the hill-side and in part on the
low lands on the stream. The mountain is eight miles distant. Without
knowledge of the precise location of the name several interpretations of
it have been made, generally from _Shawan,_ "South"--South Mountain,
South Water, South Place. [FN-8] The latter is possible, _i. e._ a place
lying south of Nescotack, as in the sentence: "Schawangung, Nescotack,
and the Paltz." From the topography of the locative, however, Mr. William
R. Gerard suggests that the derivatives are _Scha_ (or _Shaw_), "Side,"
_-ong,_ "hill," and _-unk,_ locative, the combination reading, "At (or
on) the hill-side." [FN-9] This reading is literally sustained by the
locative.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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